Let's take real life as an example. In real life, I am a restaurant manager. This is my role. However, next week I could get a new job and change my role. Not permanent.

Ok, now a story. I have a character that is a thief. However, after one day realizing the effect is stealing has on his victims he changes his morals and becomes policeman.

Now for q video game. I play a summon wd. Zombie dogs are out and fighting when another poison wd comes along and I like his poison skills so I switch. I'm still my same wd. The role does not have to be permanent.

Again, this is all assuming that you do switch. My personal opinion is that even though every skill is accessible, people will still choose their main six and use them for 75% of the game.

As for the min/max thing, the open skills actually allows people to just play how they want to without worrying about min/maxing. You can play however you want, if you get stuck, find another skill build that works. No need to sit and plan out forever. So, I'm kind of confused on why you think this makes the open skills bad?

What it all comes down to is people who want to switch can. Those who want to be strict on themselves cannot switch as well. Really, the people who are upset about this are really just trying to press their own playstyle on everyone else. Why not leave it open so both groups can be happy.

I'd say roleplaying has more to do with deliberate choices, rather than any kind of permanancy.

Since you have all the skills available, there is a greater opportunity cost to sticking with those aligned with whatever character you choose to make.

For instance, if there is a portion of the game where having some zombie dogs would be great, but you don't because your WD only uses fire spells, there should be more roleplaying satisfaction in beating that section using only fire spells than giving in to "rollplay" and choosing the optimal skills.

You still don't have to worry about min/maxing if you don't want to. You can still play a wand barb if you like, or a bow wizard, or whatever.

And I do think people will be looking up wiki info on the games you mentioned. Just because you don't care about skill power doesn't mean others don't. And I am of the opinion that the vast majority of people are concerned with both roll and role capability, "I want to make a DH, but one that heavily uses traps! Kind of like Batman, but not so up-close!" vs "The most dps that a DH can output is if they take x,y,z passives and stick with double crossbows, therefore this is the only choice"-and-"my dh is actually all sunshines and lollipops, and really just wants to let the demons know that they're preventing themselves and others from self-actualizing, and that they'd be better off if they stopped doing that."

I've watched Force's video covering the details of why the stat point customization was removed. From what I recall Jay saying, it was basically a problem of there really being only one "right" way to configure your stat points if you're trying to make your character as effective as possible. This was how it worked in D2, and this is what they were seeing in testing for D3. So they scrapped it because it wasn't really providing much in the way of customization. Have I got this right so far?

What I don't understand is why they didn't just redesign the base stats to a more sophisticated system? Not crazy complicated that required tons of research to figure out, but something that allowed players to make different choices that could still be viable builds. For example, choosing between stats that might increase damage, or crit, or hit, or block, or avoidance, or resist etc. If those were more spread out across more base stats, wouldn't that allow for more varied builds? Those various stat builds would then synergise well/poorly with various abilities on your character. Matching up a good type of stat build with the abilities you want to use for your playstyle would be fun wouldn't it?

I was really hoping they would do something like that with a simple respec mechanic. I know you can still do character building to your chosen playstyle using skill choices and rune choices, but wouldn't keeping that extra layer of player choice give you a feeling like you were more "specialized"?

Even if in the first week of release people have figured out the best min/max builds and posted them online, who cares? If that's what people want to do, good for them, let them. If others would rather try something different, let them too. I really just don't like this approach of scrapping the system instead of taking the opportunity to fix it.

Not trying to QQ here btw. I'm really just curious if others have been thinking the same thing and if anyone has any thoughts as to why they didn't take this kind of approach?

I've watched Force's video covering the details of why the stat point customization was removed. From what I recall Jay saying, it was basically a problem of there really being only one "right" way to configure your stat points if you're trying to make your character as effective as possible. This was how it worked in D2, and this is what they were seeing in testing for D3. So they scrapped it because it wasn't really providing much in the way of customization. Have I got this right so far?

What I don't understand is why they didn't just redesign the base stats to a more sophisticated system? Not crazy complicated that required tons of research to figure out, but something that allowed players to make different choices that could still be viable builds. For example, choosing between stats that might increase damage, or crit, or hit, or block, or avoidance, or resist etc. If those were more spread out across more base stats, wouldn't that allow for more varied builds? Those various stat builds would then synergise well/poorly with various abilities on your character. Matching up a good type of stat build with the abilities you want to use for your playstyle would be fun wouldn't it?

I was really hoping they would do something like that with a simple respec mechanic. I know you can still do character building to your chosen playstyle using skill choices and rune choices, but wouldn't keeping that extra layer of player choice give you a feeling like you were more "specialized"?

Even if in the first week of release people have figured out the best min/max builds and posted them online, who cares? If that's what people want to do, good for them, let them. If others would rather try something different, let them too. I really just don't like this approach of scrapping the system instead of taking the opportunity to fix it.

Not trying to QQ here btw. I'm really just curious if others have been thinking the same thing and if anyone has any thoughts as to why they didn't take this kind of approach?

I'm still waiting for someone to ask him what I'm asking though. I like what they're keeping with skill choices and rune choices, but I still don't see why they couldn't have improved the stat point system to overcome it's short-comings rather than scrapping it. I guess I'll just have to wait and hope that someone puts that question to them at some point.

I'm still waiting for someone to ask him what I'm asking though. I like what they're keeping with skill choices and rune choices, but I still don't see why they couldn't have improved the stat point system to overcome it's short-comings rather than scrapping it. I guess I'll just have to wait and hope that someone puts that question to them at some point.

He did explain it earlier at Irvine I think. The argument were that there was no customization anyway. You spent x amount of points in str to be able to carry gear, x amount in dex for block and rest in vita. That was the truth for most speccs. They saw a similar trend in D3 and removed it and focused on better ways to customize (runes, gems, gearchoice etc.)

Eros, because stats were a very user-unfriendly form of customization, even if done ideally. Diablo 3 is being aimed to be a game that the average player can pick up and enjoy without feeling that he has to make decisions that he doesn't understand that are semi-permanent.

Diablo 3's removal of stat points(transferring stat customization exclusively to gear), switching from skill points to skill slots, etc was a way for them to make the game easier for people who are first picking it up without removing any significant amount of meaningful customization. I say meaningful customization in the sense of actualy deep decisions to make that one can make from a role playing standpoint or from a min-maxing standpoint.

Keep in mind that even without skillpoints and stat points we still have more customization than we've ever had before.

Stats: There will be far more diverse items, and the addition of a proper crafting system dramatically increases stat customization. In addition, many passives have stat bonuses attached to them further allowing you to customize your stats. Furthermore, the addition of what, 15 tiers of gems makes stat customization even more long-term and deep.
Skills: Skill-swapping allows people to really choose which skills they like rather than making a guess at it at level 1 and hoping they're right. In addition, passives also act as your synergies did, by improving damage in meaningful ways. In addition to this, runes make such a dramatic difference in your skills - by having 5 different versions of each skill characters effectively have 100-125 skills to choose from. That is a LOT of choice.
Appearance: With more gear available, and different sets by difficulty, we have more appearance choices. Add to that they dye system and you're left with a very diverse appearance system.

And every bit of our customization now will, if done right, be MEANINGFUL. Most of Diablo 2's customization was either heavily restrictive or largely meaningless(like stat points). I think adding much more would just make the game unfriendly - and we all want the game to sell well so Blizzard has more money to put into things like the Diablo universe don't we?

I don't know about the whole belt, but a giant barbarian belt buckle would be pretty sweet!

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